Exchange server plays home to user mailboxes for an entire organization. With hundreds of incoming and outgoing emails per day, the size of Exchange mailboxes is bound to exceed its limits. Exporting large mailboxes to PST format is the only way to protect them from inevitable corruption. Stellar EDB to PST Converter is the ideal choice for exporting large Exchange mailboxes to PST format.

For any organization, its database is priceless. All business documents, user mailboxes, and hundreds of other entities reside within it. Thus, every possible measure is taken to safeguard it from damage. But with so much data piling up within the database for years, the size of the Exchange database file (EDB) is sure to exceed safe limits. Lest it turns corrupt, some actions must be taken to reduce the EDB file size. One of the best ways to do it is by converting the EDB file to PST format.

The difficulties of exporting large mailboxes to PST

It sounds simple in theory but exporting data from large EDB files to PST format is practically tricky. There are a lot of methods to do it but the problem lies in the large file size that needs to be converted. Usual methods that work with mailbox export fail when the size of the mailboxes exceeds a certain limit. For example:

Microsoft Outlook freezes while trying to export

Finding the correct parameter to export using New-MailboxExportRequest is challenging

Trying to export mailboxes larger than 5GB with the New-MailboxExportRequest command results in error 0x80040115

Thus, to accomplish the export, some workarounds need to be adopted.

Solutions to the problem

There are several ways to solve the issue:

Manual folder-by-folder export through Outlook

Exporting to separate PST files for each Exchange folder. However you should take care that each individual PST shouldn’t exceed a size of 20GB

Using parameters like “ContentFilter” in conjunction with “IncludeFolders” when executing the New-MailboxExportRequest command

Export using an all-in-one (CAS+HUB+MBX) server. For this you’ll first need to move the target mailbox on this server. Thereafter, follow these steps:

a. Create a share on CAS server

b. Use PowerShell command New-MailboxExportRequest with the MRS service running on the CAS server to translate information to PST and store it on a UNC path.

Split the mailbox using date ranges with the help of Search-Mailbox command and then export each smaller mailbox

Use a third-party product to split PST and spawn a new one when the set limit is reached. For example, when the first PST reaches 20GB, spawn a new incrementing PST and start exporting data to it.

Recommend Third-Party Software

If none of the other techniques work and you need to go with a third-party tool to complete the job, we recommend that you use Stellar EDB to PST Converter. This professional tool extracts all vital Exchange mailbox data such as emails, contacts, attachments, etc. from online as well as offline EDB files and converts it into equivalent Outlook PST format. This handy tool can help you shed some load off old EDB files by converting them to PST format and moving them to local machines. Also, since it supports conversion of online EDB file, you won’t have to dismount the database during the process. It can thus save you from hours of server downtime and loss of productivity.

The Final Word

To avoid EDB files and mailboxes from growing extra-large in size, here’s a suggestion – instead of splitting the mailbox when it gets large, create a new journaling mailbox as the "current one" grows to 10GB. This way, you won't need to split the mailbox later. Also, you may wish to consider using a separate journaling server and host the journaled mailboxes on it. In any case, now you know how you can handle “export large mailboxes” problem through reliable third-party software.